Founder of https://nitter.cf/t.co/Uj2WaKHKKA & host https://nitter.cf/t.co/d5yjLvmz3a. Investor: Watney, Natural, Whoop, Replit, HeyClicky, Pam, and more.
San Francisco
Joined July 2020
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Three years ago, I started Alif.
Today, I'm sharing the story behind why we're building it.
The World is Changing Hands.
alif.build/manifesto
Omar Waseem retweeted
you can do all the things he mentioned,
right from your coding agent
offense.sh
Attacks will accelerate from here on - We are there: Six months ago I said Mythos like capability will be widely available. It's happening. A critical vulnerability, a social engineering attack that looks innocuous, or daisy chaining publicly available vulnerabilities and conducting a sniper strike is all being witnessed in the wild. Incident responders have never been busier.
Some key points:
- attacks are not becoming more sophisticated, it's the same attacks, faster and by a lot more people.
- attack path discovery which took trial and error and multiple attempts is now trivial, open source LLMs are here to help
- you are as secure as your supply chain, insecure down or upstream players who have access to your infrastructure could be the next attack path, marketplaces and supply chain is an easier vector
The increase in activity is a result of more people becoming better at hacking due to the ease of being able to attack. Had not contemplated that in my calculus.
Please:
1. Test your infrastructure for accessible vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
2. Fix your code and demand your vendors do.
3. Old infra, or insecure infra at the perimeter needs to be updated first
4. New AI tools, especially coding need a security framework. Your developers will do more with code, new skills, and more automation. Don't forget the coding models have trained on human code.
Stay safe this Halloween :)
Omar Waseem retweeted
There’s a lot of noise around technology, specifically AI, and uncertainty about the future.
Most visions of the future have largely been articulated by and for actors interested merely in accumulating more wealth for its own sake.
As the commons is burned on a bonfire to fuel zero-sum games, trust in public institutions is cratering and a tsunami of anger swells against technology companies.
There has to be something different: a vision of the future geared towards seeing society and its maintenance as a trust held for later generations.
What kind of future are we building? Is it worth inheriting?
If you’re in the Bay Area, and you’re interested in what it means to build a world worth inheriting, you should attend this talk!
A few days ago I released “The World Is Changing Hands.”
Since then, it’s been read by over 100,000 people.
So we’re hosting a series of events around the themes behind the essay: what makes an ambition worth pursuing, what our abilities should serve, and what it takes to build something that outlasts us.
Hosting the first one this Wednesday in San Francisco with Sumaiya Balbale, former CMO and COO of Sequoia Capital.
Reach out if you’re in the Bay Area for details.
A few days ago I released “The World Is Changing Hands.”
Since then, it’s been read by over 100,000 people.
So we’re hosting a series of events around the themes behind the essay: what makes an ambition worth pursuing, what our abilities should serve, and what it takes to build something that outlasts us.
Hosting the first one this Wednesday in San Francisco with Sumaiya Balbale, former CMO and COO of Sequoia Capital.
Reach out if you’re in the Bay Area for details.
Interesting things happening @parameter_ai
Omar Waseem retweeted
From the moment we're born into this world, everything we've been given is an amanah.
Now the question is: how we use this amanah to build something that continues to benefit the present & future of the Ummah, keeps doing good even after we're gone, & stands as a testament to
Three years ago, I started Alif.
Today, I'm sharing the story behind why we're building it.
The World is Changing Hands.
alif.build/manifesto
Omar Waseem retweeted
"the moment in history we are born into is also an amanah"
most people build companies for the next few years
omar is building something for generations to come
long term vision
backed by the right people
and only getting started
my bets are on omar
proud
Three years ago, I started Alif.
Today, I'm sharing the story behind why we're building it.
The World is Changing Hands.
alif.build/manifesto
Yasser Elsaid grew up in Egypt, moved to Toronto at 19, and bootstrapped Chatbase to $10M ARR, a milestone it crossed this past May. He thinks that’s not a coincidence.
“A lot of the greatest founders have this situation where they’re insiders enough, but they’re also outsiders. Steve Jobs was from a Syrian background, but he grew up in Silicon Valley. Napoleon was not raised in France, but he ended up becoming the emperor of France.”
His theory: embrace the new way of thinking, keep what your upbringing taught you, and combine the good traits of both. “It’s very hard to lose then. You have all the advantages of being in a place like SF, but you also know this is a bubble, and not everyone in the world thinks this way.”
That perspective is why people who move to SF keep doing great things there.
Full conversation with Yasser Elsaid on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @yasser_elsaid_, Founder of Chatbase
00:00 Origins of Chatbase & ChatGPT for Your Data
03:03 Getting First Revenue & Creative Early Marketing
06:11 Dealing with AI Fatigue & Shifting to Enterprise Sales
09:25 Growing Pains of Combining PLG and Enterprise Motions
10:33 Philosophy on Bootstrapping vs. Raising VC
13:27 Scaling Capital Constraints vs. Reinvesting Revenue
14:05 Evolution as a CEO: From Doing Everything to Managing Culture
17:10 Operating Cadence & Company Rants
17:44 SF vs. NY: Geographic Ambition & The AI Bubble
21:51 Background & Perspective: The Insider/Outsider Advantage
23:44 Self-Reliance, Swimming, and Archery
26:01 Running a Company as a Smart Dictatorship
29:02 Attracting Smart Talent as a Solo Founder
32:33 Rethinking Co-Founders & Co-Founder Breakups
34:19 Riding the Next Wave of Personal & Business AI Agents
36:24 The Founder Persona: $0 to $10M vs. $10M to $100M ARR
37:41 Moving Goalposts & What Drives Ambition Beyond Money
40:33 Exploring Large Capital Raises for Hypergrowth
41:23 Goals for Next Year: Multi-City Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent
He built 10 side projects looking for one that could become a company. The eleventh was Chatbase, now at $10M ARR with no investors and no co-founders.
It started in his last semester of school, right after ChatGPT launched. Yasser Elsaid saw the gap: “ChatGPT was just a chat interface... you couldn’t add any specific data about you, about a book, about a website.” So he built ChatGPT for your data and launched it to “my not so many followers on Twitter.”
He even knew OpenAI would probably build the same thing eventually. He launched anyway: “I just needed to see where the market takes me.”
A year later it was an AI customer service agent. Today it’s a general customer-facing AI agent for businesses.
Full conversation with @yasser_elsaid_ on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @yasser_elsaid_, Founder of Chatbase
00:00 Origins of Chatbase & ChatGPT for Your Data
03:03 Getting First Revenue & Creative Early Marketing
06:11 Dealing with AI Fatigue & Shifting to Enterprise Sales
09:25 Growing Pains of Combining PLG and Enterprise Motions
10:33 Philosophy on Bootstrapping vs. Raising VC
13:27 Scaling Capital Constraints vs. Reinvesting Revenue
14:05 Evolution as a CEO: From Doing Everything to Managing Culture
17:10 Operating Cadence & Company Rants
17:44 SF vs. NY: Geographic Ambition & The AI Bubble
21:51 Background & Perspective: The Insider/Outsider Advantage
23:44 Self-Reliance, Swimming, and Archery
26:01 Running a Company as a Smart Dictatorship
29:02 Attracting Smart Talent as a Solo Founder
32:33 Rethinking Co-Founders & Co-Founder Breakups
34:19 Riding the Next Wave of Personal & Business AI Agents
36:24 The Founder Persona: $0 to $10M vs. $10M to $100M ARR
37:41 Moving Goalposts & What Drives Ambition Beyond Money
40:33 Exploring Large Capital Raises for Hypergrowth
41:23 Goals for Next Year: Multi-City Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent
Conversation with @yasser_elsaid_, Founder of Chatbase
00:00 Origins of Chatbase & ChatGPT for Your Data
03:03 Getting First Revenue & Creative Early Marketing
06:11 Dealing with AI Fatigue & Shifting to Enterprise Sales
09:25 Growing Pains of Combining PLG and Enterprise Motions
10:33 Philosophy on Bootstrapping vs. Raising VC
13:27 Scaling Capital Constraints vs. Reinvesting Revenue
14:05 Evolution as a CEO: From Doing Everything to Managing Culture
17:10 Operating Cadence & Company Rants
17:44 SF vs. NY: Geographic Ambition & The AI Bubble
21:51 Background & Perspective: The Insider/Outsider Advantage
23:44 Self-Reliance, Swimming, and Archery
26:01 Running a Company as a Smart Dictatorship
29:02 Attracting Smart Talent as a Solo Founder
32:33 Rethinking Co-Founders & Co-Founder Breakups
34:19 Riding the Next Wave of Personal & Business AI Agents
36:24 The Founder Persona: $0 to $10M vs. $10M to $100M ARR
37:41 Moving Goalposts & What Drives Ambition Beyond Money
40:33 Exploring Large Capital Raises for Hypergrowth
41:23 Goals for Next Year: Multi-City Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent Offices & Becoming the Default AI Agent
He built a $10M ARR software company in 3 years with no co-founder and no investors.
This is Yasser Elsaid, founder of Chatbase, the platform businesses use to build AI support agents on their own data.
He interned at Tesla and Meta, then skipped his final classes to build what became Chatbase instead. That was after 10 other side projects.
Solo bootstrapping came with a cost. In his words, “you’re pressing the brakes a lot more... because you’re just scared that... you might run out of money.” And when something breaks, “everything is your fault.”
He’d still choose it: “Dictatorships is how you build a good company, a great company.”
Full episode releasing Thursday on YouTube and Spotify.
Sign up to get notified when the full episode releases: youtu.be/KYFXNqn9FYg
Hit up Rayyan if you’re in LA!
I'm moving to Los Angeles 🌴
I started my company in early 2024 after dropping out of college with no idea on how to build or run a company.
5 months later, I moved to San Francisco knowing I had to go all in if I wanted this to work. I lived with @omarwasm and @miralizain, who are some of my closest friends to date.
For 1 year straight, I turned up everyday not knowing if this would become a real company or not.
I went broke, caught COVID, spent many days eating grilled cheeses from in-n-out for dinner, and spent 6am mornings thinking about what more I could do.
However, after my lease ended in 2025, I walked out with some of the fastest growing startups as clients, having a work ethic for the first time in my life, and hiring people that are still on the team today.
The only problem now was that I was very lost on what I wanted from life.
I had a bootstrapped money making money, and for the first time in my life, I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
So I travelled the world, explored 8+ countries, got engaged, made stupid purchases, and honestly, took it easy for the last 9 months.
Travelling the world is something I'd recommend everyone to do atleast once in their life, but I knew deep down it was time to take my life more seriously if I wanted to grow my company to what it has the potential to be.
Since coming back to the US, I spent time debating between LA, San Diego, Miami, and New york.
I'm not going to lie, I don't know why I've picked LA. I've always been someone who just goes with their intuition and figures it out along the way.
Long term, I have no clue if Los Angeles is going to be the place for me either, but I'd rather turn up and see what life has in store for me.
Because when I look back on my life, I want every decision to be on my terms, where I left as little unexplored as possible.
Really excited for this next chapter :)
If you're living in LA, would love to meet people in the startup/creative space!!!
I asked a $1.3B founder for one piece of advice for day one, and one for the day after you sell.
Haroon Mokhtarzada built Rocket Money, the app millions use to catch forgotten subscriptions, lower their bills, and manage their money. He has lived both of these days, and his two answers could not be more different.
For day one: “getting really good visibility and… having your metrics regularly in your face is really important.”
For the day after the sale: “It’s very normal to feel disoriented after an exit. Most people get depressed after an exit, actually.” His advice there had nothing to do with money. “…just make sure, like, you don’t judge yourself for that. It’s normal. It’s part of the process.”
The first answer is about numbers. The second one stuck with me more.
Full conversation with @haroon on YouTube and Spotify.
Conversation with @Haroon, Founder of Rocket Money (ex. Truebill).
00:00 Intro & Entrepreneurship
01:15 Childhood & First Business
02:33 Founding & Scaling Webs
05:42 "The Floundery" Brainstorming
07:02 Team Strategy & Brotherhood
12:18 True Bill Subscription Pivot
16:01 Performance Marketing Math
19:18 Minimizing Team Dependencies
20:19 App Attribution & TV Ads
24:47 Talent & Leadership Philosophy
29:35 Workplace Culture & Feedback
33:01 Stepping Down as CEO
35:17 Post-Acquisition Reality
38:30 Wealth, Faith & Happiness
46:39 Figuring Out What's Next
50:44 Advice for Founders